Erik Olin Wright

Erik Olin Wright was born on 9 February 1947 in Berkeley, California, and grew up in Lawrence, Kansas; he died on 23 January 2019. He studied at Harvard and Oxford, trained briefly as a Unitarian seminarian and worked as a student chaplain at San Quentin prison, an experience that informed his first book on prisons. He completed his doctorate in sociology at Berkeley and taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1976 until his death. He was elected president of the American Sociological Association in 2012.

Wright was a leading member of the 'analytical Marxism' group, which sought to reconstruct Marxist ideas with the tools of analytical philosophy and social science. From the early 1990s he directed the Real Utopias Project, a series of conferences and edited volumes on concrete alternatives to existing institutions.

• Class analysis. In Classes (1985) and Class Counts (1997) Wright sought to make the Marxist concept of class usable in empirical research. His idea of 'contradictory class locations' described managers, supervisors and experts who are simultaneously exploiters and exploited.
• Real utopias. Envisioning Real Utopias (2010) proposed evaluating alternatives by three criteria: desirability (do they advance democratic egalitarian values?), viability (would they work if implemented?) and achievability (can we get there?). Real utopias are institutions that embody emancipatory ideals and exist, at least partly, in the present.
• Social empowerment. Wright defined socialism as the subordination of economic power and state power to 'social power' rooted in voluntary association in civil society. His examples included participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Wikipedia, the Mondragon co-operatives, Quebec's social economy and unconditional basic income.
• Strategies of transformation. He distinguished ruptural strategies (a decisive break), interstitial strategies (building alternatives in the cracks of capitalism) and symbiotic strategies (reforms that solve problems for elites while expanding social power). His last book combined 'taming' and 'escaping' capitalism into a strategy of 'eroding' it.
• Empowered participatory governance. With Archon Fung he described institutions in which ordinary citizens and officials solve practical problems together through deliberation, with devolved authority, central coordination and state-backed resources — illustrated by Chicago community policing and school councils, Porto Alegre's budget, Kerala's decentralised planning and US habitat conservation planning.

Wright's Real Utopias Project created a common vocabulary for comparing institutional experiments. Its volumes — on associational democracy, market socialism, basic income, stakeholder grants, empowered participatory governance, gender equality and sortition-based legislatures (Legislature by Lot, 2019, edited by John Gastil and Wright) — became standard references in their fields. The criteria of desirability, viability and achievability are a practical checklist for evaluating proposals catalogued in an atlas like this one, separating what is attractive in principle from what has been shown to work and what could be reached from present conditions.

The 'empowered participatory governance' framework influenced research on participatory budgeting, co-governance and community-driven development, and the debate on how participatory institutions can avoid capture or tokenism.

• From the right. Critics argue that his preferred alternatives depend on state funding and coercion, underrate markets' incentive and knowledge functions, and generalise from small or favourable cases.
• From the left. Some Marxists see interstitial and symbiotic strategies as reformism that leaves capitalist power intact, and question whether real utopias can scale without a break.
• Case selection. The flagship examples have mixed records: Porto Alegre's participatory budget was weakened after changes of government, and Mondragon has faced market pressures and internal inequalities. Supporters respond that Wright treated such problems as part of viability analysis.

• Classes (1985); Class Counts (1997)
• 'Deepening Democracy: Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance' (2001, with Archon Fung), Politics & Society — DOI; expanded as Deepening Democracy (Verso, 2003)
• Envisioning Real Utopias (Verso, 2010)
• How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2019)
• Overview: 'Erik Olin Wright', Wikipedia